Big beasts at Leveson

Paxo and Marr at the Leveson Inquiry next Wednesday.  Mr Paxman will probably be quizzed about his 2007 MacTaggart lecture, in which he opined thus...

I remember once being in Number Eleven Downing Street waiting to do an interview with Gordon Brown, and a side door from Number 12 opening. In previous governments, Number Twelve was where the Chief Whip had his office. Now, as it swung back I was astonished to see the place had been taken over by what seemed to be a fibre-optic version of a Victorian counting house - a squad of young people sitting at rows of desks, on the phone bending the ears of journalists. At the top – can he really have been sitting at a higher desk? - that's certainly how I think I remember it – sat the brooding figure of Alastair Campbell. The scene showed how thoroughly priorities had changed: where once government used the room to control and discipline its MPs in parliament it now used it to try something similar with the media.

And Gordon Brown will probably figure in the Marr questioning. How did this exchange come about ?